Can Computers be Conscious?

Don't  absolutely know they cannot compute consciousness unless I know the definition of consciousness being used.   With a very bare definition a computer 'knows it knows something',  say the setting of a single bit.    And can modify it at will.  By scanning and toggling it.  So in that way it is conscious.  Of course nothing approaching human consciousness, not even near it .... but it is a first step.  ...

Why a computer will never be truly conscious
Author  Subhash Kak  Regents Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Oklahoma State University

Subhash Kak does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Oklahoma State University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US.

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project to do just that.

So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed. That effort has shifted to look more like a similar but less ambitious project in the U.S., developing new software tools for researchers to study brain data, rather than simulating a brain.

Some researchers continue to insist that simulating neuroscience with computers is the way to go. Others, like me, view these efforts as doomed to failure because we do not believe consciousness is computable. Our basic argument is that brains integrate and compress multiple components of an experience, including sight and smell – which simply can’t be handled in the way today’s computers sense, process and store data.  ... ".... '